James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Here's a sketch I did yesterday called "Behind the Diner," painted in casein on location in Red Hook, New York.

The basic process involved washing the color in transparently and then blocking the big shapes in with flat brushes, then finishing up with smaller round brushes.

Incidentally, the blue colors aren't this intense--has anyone noticed that Blogger seems to have installed an auto-color enhancer algorithm?
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EDIT: Thanks to Stuart for researching about the auto-enhance feature on Google plus (see comments). I went into Google Plus settings and deactivated that setting. Here's the image with the auto-enhance turned off, which is a lot closer to the original:

5 comments:

I have also noticed the color correction, but I didn't do any research until now because I thought maybe I was just crazy. Apparently this is an issue related to google using an Auto-enhance feature through Google+ that is on by default (even if you don't use Google+). Here is an article about dealing with it: http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.ca/2013/10/stop-auto-enhance-being-applied-to-pictures-in-blogger.html

In light of Google's "helpful" meddling, are there any other paintings that have been altered? I'd be interested in a post with just the images that were affected all reposted in a row, so that I could see them properly. Unless of course this has been happening for a long time, cause that would be a lot of work.

On google plus, there may be an album corresponding to the whole blog (this is the case for me). I don't know if there is a faster way to find all the enhanced images, but if I click on one of the images, I can navigate through the album with the arrow keys and it will briefly show in the upper right corner "Enhanced" if that image was indeed enhanced. It can be turned off there. From my quick test though, that doesn't seem to update the image on the actual blog page.

Yes, I had this problem a while back. It took me forever to find out why.As far as I know you do have to go back and upload the image again in blog editor since it won't fix itself once the "Auto-enhance" has been turned off.This is Googles sneaky way of making us have a Google + account. You can't turn it off without one.